Top 7 2014 Dev Tool Releases You Should Know About

It's been a great year for new development tools and technologies. We look back at seven releases that didn't get all the attention they deserve.

By Terrence Dorsey

12/17/2014

It's that time of year again, when we often try to wrap up projects, take stock of what we've accomplished so far, and plan ahead for the new challenges 2015 will bring.

On the subject of taking stock, I thought it would be a good idea to look back at some of the most important, most interesting tools and technologies released over the past 12 months that might have been overlooked. You'll find a grab bag of different tools here -- there's there no real theme other than handy utilities and big releases that haven't been highlighted here yet.

So let's jump right in.

Sysinternals Sysmon 1
Yeah, that's right, Sysinternals. Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell have been creating must-have utilities for system administration and troubleshooting since … well, longer than most of us want to admit using them. While not expressly development tools, I know precious few programmers working on Windows systems who don't regularly turn to classic Sysinternals utilities to get the job done.

And why do I bring up Sysinternals here, in a 2014 year-end wrap up? Because for the first time in several years, Mark (along with Thomas Garnier) has released an entirely new tool, Sysmon (System Monitor). 1

Sysmon is a service you install and that remains resident across system reboots. It uses Windows Event Collection or SIEM agents to monitor systems, logging data that potentially lets you identify and diagnose system intrusions, malware and other strange activity.

Xamarin 3, Xamarin Designer for iOS and Xamarin Insights
This one's not a secret, but definitely worth highlighting: the folks at Xamarin had a huge release with Xamarin 3, their development platform that enables you to create native Android, iOS, Mac and Windows apps with C#. As they say, "Anything you can do in Objective-C, Swift or Java, you can do in C#" with Xamarin's tools.

But that's not all. This fall, Xamarin also announced Xamarin Insights " Real-time Monitoring for Your Apps" and Xamarin Test Cloud, shown in Figure 1, a cloud-based mobile application test service that lets you test your app on pretty much every widely available device and mobile OS combination available today.

DockerDocker is an open-source platform for building and running lightweight, containerized, resource-isolated application servers within a single Linux instance. It's all the rage among my colleagues at the moment because, rather than configuring and sharing Chef or Puppet configurations to build a reproducible server setup, you can share the actual Docker container directly and duplicate a container as many times as possible.

This is a pretty recent announcement and full support is still under development. However, just a few weeks ago at TechEd Europe, Mark Russinovich gave a Windows Docker Client Demo showing Docker in Linux containers on Azure. Dig into that article not only for the demo video, but also details on using the Docker VM Extension with the Azure Portal.

Azure Projects on GitHub
Speaking of Azure, did you notice the "Contribute to this article" message with the cute Octocat at the bottom of each documentation page, shown in Figure 2?

[Click on image for larger view.]Figure 2. Azure Is Taking Pull Requests for Documentation And More

Guy Burstein explains that "Contributions to Azure documentation and SDK's on GitHub just got simpler" over on the Microsoft Azure Blog. It's not quite as simple as forking the project and submitting a pull request, but the team created an Azure Pull Request Bot that evaluates whether you need a Contribution License Agreement (CLA), lets you sign the agreement online if necessary, and kicks off any further discussion needed.

So, whether you want to fix a bug, contribute new features or extend the documentation, it's a lot easier than it's ever been to give back to the community.

Of course, the InstallShield and WiX installer options are still available, too.

So, not much of a theme for the tool highlights this month, but I hope you'll agree they were worth taking a look back. And going forward into 2015, I'll definitely be keeping an eye on new announcements like Docker and Kubernetes support from Microsoft Open Technologies. Watch this space for news!

About the Author

Terrence Dorsey is a technical writer, editor and content strategist specializing in technology and software development. Over the last 25-plus years he has worked on developer-focused projects at ESPN, The Code Project, and Microsoft. Read his blog at http://terrencedorsey.com or follow @tpdorsey on Twitter.